So seeing this thread convinced me to buy Shogun 2. I had RTW and Empire: Total War, but I just dicked around in skirmish in those. I plan to take Shogun's campaign more seriously. Any tips before I venture off?

Christianity is a bitch, never turn a blind eye on any provinces you own that have generally Christian populations. That's if you decide to remain Shinto-Buddhist. You'd probably be used to religions being bitchy if you've played much of previous Total War games anyways though.

Christianity is a bitch, never turn a blind eye on any provinces you own that have generally Christian populations. That's if you decide to remain Shinto-Buddhist. You'd probably be used to religions being bitchy if you've played much of previous Total War games anyways though.

So I picked up SHogun 2 after a friend of mine who has played the all wouldnt stop yappin about it.

First game, Chosokabe on easy. Well I was going a bit slow because I didnt really know what I was doing. Did get the black ship, which is awesome. I forgot to copy my save when reinstalling my computer so I never finished this.

Second game, Hojo. Going pretty well had around 20 provinces. But i played it way to safe and ran out of time.

Third game, Normal difficulty. Shimazu. I still have 20 years and hold 39 provinces including Kyoto. The only noteworthy clan alive is the Chosokabe but I police their ports with ships so they cannot get their army´s off.

2 things,
1.What is up with massive ashigaru army´s with 5 generals?
2.Can I keep playing to take over japan if I win?

So seeing this thread convinced me to buy Shogun 2. I had RTW and Empire: Total War, but I just dicked around in skirmish in those. I plan to take Shogun's campaign more seriously. Any tips before I venture off?

The best defence is attack. And always attack with 2 army´s per side.
One attacks past the other ones captured province while the other recuperates.

Its also very funny to offload your ary behind enemy lines with a boat and attack one of their more empty castles. They will lose alot of men trying to get it back.

Every campaign would be better with a longer/infinite time limit. I always freak out when I realize I'm half-way through the game and I've just been trading the whole time.

You can double/quadruple the time in M2:TW. I've done it. It's some setting in the files, where is says that each turn makes 18 months go by (to go from winter to summer between turns.) Thing is, it's a relic from the R:TW engine and the characters still age at 6 months per turn. So I changed the turns to be just 6 months and now it scales a lot better, except cities explode in size near the end game.

EDIT:

1. Go to My Computer and open whichever drive you installed M2TW onto. Then go through these files:

Program Files/SEGA/Medieval II Total War/data/world/maps/campaign/imperial_ca…

This file is the one you need to mod. Open it. You'll notice a section that says:

start_date 1080 summer
end_date 1530 winter
timescale 2.00

2. Change timescale to 0.50 for turns to last 6 months.

3. Now, save the file. It will tell you it's a read only, rename it descr_strat 1 for now. You'll now have both the original and modded versions visible in the folder. Change the name of the original file to descr_strat Original, then, rename your modded file to just descr_strat. The game will now use your modded file instead of the original one. It's worth noting that editing the descr_strat.txt will only work in new campaigns, not saved ones.

Been playing Empire Total War all week and I finally go to the point where I controlled entire Europe as Sweden. Then, ofcourse. Clamour for Reform kicks in and I loose about half of it to rebells in a year, my empire is in ruin and bankrupt. Its sad to see your empire crumble before your eyes.

Goddamn my game's crashing like fuck on my laptop, particularly on multiplayer campaign. It's always when our turns end, usually around the twentieth turn, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Now it's crashing on the regular campaign too. Never did this on my PC, would it be a hardware issue or is there a really bad bug with the DLC because I'm using a different account on my laptop.

I've gotten to a point in my United Provinces campaign where I'm besieged in India and Mexico and I've been holding them off regardless of being outnumbered 4 to 1, but now both of the battle have a weird problem where they crash after about 20 minutes (in game) if I choose to fight them. I either have to fight off hordes of swordsmen in less than 20 minutes or just give up the settlements via auto-resolve. This fucking sucks.

I'm thinking of just scrapping my United Provinces game in favor of a Maratha campaign. Does anybody have an opinion about them?

Been playing Empire Total War all week and I finally go to the point where I controlled entire Europe as Sweden. Then, ofcourse. Clamour for Reform kicks in and I loose about half of it to rebells in a year, my empire is in ruin and bankrupt. Its sad to see your empire crumble before your eyes.

That's why you don't dominate Europe all in one go.

I find that the best thing that works for me is when you've researched everything and your money flow is really good, build a lot of "Pleasure Gardens", and pump out cheap infantry units and cannon units. When the rebellions start popping up put them down with all of the units you've pumped out.

I had the best battle in Empire as Prussia fighting poland, my city was attacked by a full-stack of mainly infantry led by 2 generals. I had a unit of pikemen, 3 units of militia, a cannon, 1 unit of firelock citizens and 2 units light infantry, all half to quarter strength, except of the citizens.

I have the citizens and the militia fire on the enemy until they broke my gate with a cannon, the light infantry and my cannon (behind the cover-thingys you can make pre-battle) managed to hold off the charging infantry while my militia lined up behind the cover set-up in front of them, things were going well until their cannon got into range and started hammering my light infantry. Since I was trapped inside the fort due to the mass of enemies, I could do nothing to stop that cannon. The polish generals led a full-on charge, destroying my militia and forcing them to flee, the only thing standing between my fragile light infantry + cannon and the enemy was my pikemen.

The enemy army charged, but were slowed by my cannon and my light infantry, but there was a brief lull when my light infantry had to reload that gave enough time to the enemy to reach my pikemen. I thought my men were to be slaughtered, but it was the Pikemen that did the slaughtering! For over an hour they held the line against the sea of poles, enough time for my last scraps of militia to reform and stand beside the pikemen. But in an instant, I still have no idea how it happened, but in a single second I went from a full unit of pikemen holding the line and destroying the enemy, to my pikemen dropping like flies and the militia getting finished off. After the pikemen were destroyed, the remains of my army fought to the death, even the cannon operators joining in the fight.

As the smoke of battle cleared, it turns out I had killed both generals and destroyed 3 quarters of an army easily tenfold the size of mine. The next few turns I turned my main army around and retook that city, slaughtering the poles like they slaughtered my men, justice served, I proceeded to destroy the poles, burn every building to the ground and left the husks of the polish cities to be claimed by roaming bands of looters and bandits.

I was thinking more the mode where I can play with a friend to conquer Japan with or against eachother. Though that might be Avatar Conquest.

That's co-op campaign, and it's kinda odd when you're starting out, such as one player not having any menu once a battle comes up until the other player chooses what to do with the battle, but it's pretty fun once you meet up with the other player and start going to war with everybody in Japan/everybody in Japan and your friend. It's probably the biggest reason Shogun 2 is better than Rome

Playing DarthMod, I chose the Danish[Vikings ofc] and promptly took most of the northern border. Apparently, I somehow pissed off -EVERYONE-, and a united Germany and Poland are marching at my borders, 6 full stacks in total.

Shogun 2 is amazing. The AI seems a lot smarter then the AI from Empire so far. Also from what I have noticed everyone pretty much starts on an even playing field(Might be wrong) unlike Empire where Denmark/Russia are Allied and makes it hard to expand.

Shogun 2 is amazing. The AI seems a lot smarter then the AI from Empire so far. Also from what I have noticed everyone pretty much starts on an even playing field(Might be wrong) unlike Empire where Denmark/Russia are Allied and makes it hard to expand.

That quickly changes after the first few turns when every other faction has 10x more units than you.

This is especially a problem on high difficulty levels, because apparently that's the only way that CA could make the game more challenging.

I love Shogun 2. It's a great game but it has its perks that make you rage.

I gave up on my Takeda game because as I was taking the final region for one of the minor factions (I have a Shogun 2 "realism" mod installed so minor factions can put up quite a fight now and actually present a real, aggressive threat) three full stacked armies of the said minor faction literally spawned out of nowhere within the region on the next turn.

I had previously fought two full stacks of their army and annihilated them with quite a few casualties. So seeing three stacks appear out of nowhere and attack my weakened army with my daimyo within it made me just go 'fuck that' and started a new game. Total bullshit if you ask me.

Still, despite stupid shit like that, the game is pretty amazing. I'd love to see the mechanics in that one improved and put a remake of Rome or M2TW. Especially M2TW, that one I think is THE perfect Total War game in terms of variety, scale and flexibility.

I love archers. Also this LOTR Mod. If, somehow, you haven't heard of it go get it now. Should probably mention it's for Medieval 2 Kingdoms only, and you have to give up one of the Kingdoms campaigns for it. Not permanently or anything.

i like to cheat and give one of the the native's 10000000 gold and some land in EU, they never seem to do anything.

Empire or Medieval?

Because in Medieval, there's one mod with a custom map that puts all the factions on a single continent, and the Aztec AI is so aggressive (and their troops are weighted so heavily) they quickly take over the world.

I was thinking more the mode where I can play with a friend to conquer Japan with or against eachother. Though that might be Avatar Conquest.

every mp campaign i have started (from the day of release, to now a year~ later) has ended with us both abandoning all hope of finishing it. this is not due to lack of effort or time however, but rather the de-syncing that occurs past the 50~ turn mark.

it is apparently being 'worked on' for the FotS update, but i'm not getting my hopes up.

Fuck you N:TW. I was doing the first campaign and was almost done with 20 turns left when my protectorate suddenly declared war on me resulting in Venice withdrawing my 5 turn access to their provinces putting me on the other side of the map.